and It Is Not What You Think

Decent view on it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-real-cause-of-addicti_b_6506936.html?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000013

It is now one hundred years since drugs were first banned — and all through this long century of waging war on drugs, we have been told a story about addiction by our teachers and by our governments. This story is so deeply ingrained in our minds that we take it for granted. It seems obvious. It seems manifestly true. Until I set off three and a half years ago on a 30,000-mile journey for my new book, Chasing The Scream: The First And Last Days of the War on Drugs, to figure out what is really driving the drug war, I believed it too. But what I learned on the road is that almost everything we have been told about addiction is wrong — and there is a very different story waiting for us, if only we are ready to hear it.

If we truly absorb this new story, we will have to change a lot more than the drug war. We will have to change ourselves.

I learned it from an extraordinary mixture of people I met on my travels. From the surviving friends of Billie Holiday, who helped me to learn how the founder of the war on drugs stalked and helped to kill her. From a Jewish doctor who was smuggled out of the Budapest ghetto as a baby, only to unlock the secrets of addiction as a grown man. From a transsexual crack dealer in Brooklyn who was conceived when his mother, a crack-addict, was raped by his father, an NYPD officer. From a man who was kept at the bottom of a well for two years by a torturing dictatorship, only to emerge to be elected President of Uruguay and to begin the last days of the war on drugs.

I had a quite personal reason to set out for these answers. One of my earliest memories as a kid is trying to wake up one of my relatives, and not being able to. Ever since then, I have been turning over the essential mystery of addiction in my mind — what causes some people to become fixated on a drug or a behavior until they can’t stop? How do we help those people to come back to us? As I got older, another of my close relatives developed a cocaine addiction, and I fell into a relationship with a heroin addict. I guess addiction felt like home to me.

If you had asked me what causes drug addiction at the start, I would have looked at you as if you were an idiot, and said: “Drugs. Duh.” It’s not difficult to grasp. I thought I had seen it in my own life. We can all explain it. Imagine if you and I and the next twenty people to pass us on the street take a really potent drug for twenty days. There are strong chemical hooks in these drugs, so if we stopped on day twenty-one, our bodies would need the chemical. We would have a ferocious craving. We would be addicted. That’s what addiction means.

One of the ways this theory was first established is through rat experiments — ones that were injected into the American psyche in the 1980s, in a famous advert by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. You may remember it. The experiment is simple. Put a rat in a cage, alone, with two water bottles. One is just water. The other is water laced with heroin or cocaine. Almost every time you run this experiment, the rat will become obsessed with the drugged water, and keep coming back for more and more, until it kills itself.

The advert explains: “Only one drug is so addictive, nine out of ten laboratory rats will use it. And use it. And use it. Until dead. It’s called cocaine. And it can do the same thing to you.”

But in the 1970s, a professor of Psychology in Vancouver called Bruce Alexander noticed something odd about this experiment. The rat is put in the cage all alone. It has nothing to do but take the drugs. What would happen, he wondered, if we tried this differently? So Professor Alexander built Rat Park. It is a lush cage where the rats would have colored balls and the best rat-food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends: everything a rat about town could want. What, Alexander wanted to know, will happen then?

In Rat Park, all the rats obviously tried both water bottles, because they didn’t know what was in them. But what happened next was startling.

The rats with good lives didn’t like the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of them died. While all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the rats who had a happy environment did.

At first, I thought this was merely a quirk of rats, until I discovered that there was — at the same time as the Rat Park experiment — a helpful human equivalent taking place. It was called the Vietnam War. Time magazine reported using heroin was “as common as chewing gum” among U.S. soldiers, and there is solid evidence to back this up: some 20 percent of U.S. soldiers had become addicted to heroin there, according to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Many people were understandably terrified; they believed a huge number of addicts were about to head home when the war ended.

But in fact some 95 percent of the addicted soldiers — according to the same study — simply stopped. Very few had rehab. They shifted from a terrifying cage back to a pleasant one, so didn’t want the drug any more.

Professor Alexander argues this discovery is a profound challenge both to the right-wing view that addiction is a moral failing caused by too much hedonistic partying, and the liberal view that addiction is a disease taking place in a chemically hijacked brain. In fact, he argues, addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you. It’s your cage.

After the first phase of Rat Park, Professor Alexander then took this test further. He reran the early experiments, where the rats were left alone, and became compulsive users of the drug. He let them use for fifty-seven days — if anything can hook you, it’s that. Then he took them out of isolation, and placed them in Rat Park. He wanted to know, if you fall into that state of addiction, is your brain hijacked, so you can’t recover? Do the drugs take you over? What happened is — again — striking. The rats seemed to have a few twitches of withdrawal, but they soon stopped their heavy use, and went back to having a normal life. The good cage saved them. (The full references to all the studies I am discussing are in the book.)

When I first learned about this, I was puzzled. How can this be? This new theory is such a radical assault on what we have been told that it felt like it could not be true. But the more scientists I interviewed, and the more I looked at their studies, the more I discovered things that don’t seem to make sense — unless you take account of this new approach.

Here’s one example of an experiment that is happening all around you, and may well happen to you one day. If you get run over today and you break your hip, you will probably be given diamorphine, the medical name for heroin. In the hospital around you, there will be plenty of people also given heroin for long periods, for pain relief. The heroin you will get from the doctor will have a much higher purity and potency than the heroin being used by street-addicts, who have to buy from criminals who adulterate it. So if the old theory of addiction is right — it’s the drugs that cause it; they make your body need them — then it’s obvious what should happen. Loads of people should leave the hospital and try to score smack on the streets to meet their habit.

But here’s the strange thing: It virtually never happens. As the Canadian doctor Gabor Mate was the first to explain to me, medical users just stop, despite months of use. The same drug, used for the same length of time, turns street-users into desperate addicts and leaves medical patients unaffected.

If you still believe — as I used to — that addiction is caused by chemical hooks, this makes no sense. But if you believe Bruce Alexander’s theory, the picture falls into place. The street-addict is like the rats in the first cage, isolated, alone, with only one source of solace to turn to. The medical patient is like the rats in the second cage. She is going home to a life where she is surrounded by the people she loves. The drug is the same, but the environment is different.

This gives us an insight that goes much deeper than the need to understand addicts. Professor Peter Cohen argues that human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. It’s how we get our satisfaction. If we can’t connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find — the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe. He says we should stop talking about ‘addiction’ altogether, and instead call it ‘bonding.’ A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn’t bond as fully with anything else.

So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.

When I learned all this, I found it slowly persuading me, but I still couldn’t shake off a nagging doubt. Are these scientists saying chemical hooks make no difference? It was explained to me — you can become addicted to gambling, and nobody thinks you inject a pack of cards into your veins. You can have all the addiction, and none of the chemical hooks. I went to a Gamblers’ Anonymous meeting in Las Vegas (with the permission of everyone present, who knew I was there to observe) and they were as plainly addicted as the cocaine and heroin addicts I have known in my life. Yet there are no chemical hooks on a craps table.

But still, surely, I asked, there is some role for the chemicals? It turns out there is an experiment which gives us the answer to this in quite precise terms, which I learned about in Richard DeGrandpre’s book The Cult of Pharmacology.

Everyone agrees cigarette smoking is one of the most addictive processes around. The chemical hooks in tobacco come from a drug inside it called nicotine. So when nicotine patches were developed in the early 1990s, there was a huge surge of optimism — cigarette smokers could get all of their chemical hooks, without the other filthy (and deadly) effects of cigarette smoking. They would be freed.

But the Office of the Surgeon General has found that just 17.7 percent of cigarette smokers are able to stop using nicotine patches. That’s not nothing. If the chemicals drive 17.7 percent of addiction, as this shows, that’s still millions of lives ruined globally. But what it reveals again is that the story we have been taught about The Cause of Addiction lying with chemical hooks is, in fact, real, but only a minor part of a much bigger picture.

This has huge implications for the one-hundred-year-old war on drugs. This massive war — which, as I saw, kills people from the malls of Mexico to the streets of Liverpool — is based on the claim that we need to physically eradicate a whole array of chemicals because they hijack people’s brains and cause addiction. But if drugs aren’t the driver of addiction — if, in fact, it is disconnection that drives addiction — then this makes no sense.

Ironically, the war on drugs actually increases all those larger drivers of addiction. For example, I went to a prison in Arizona — ‘Tent City’ — where inmates are detained in tiny stone isolation cages (‘The Hole’) for weeks and weeks on end to punish them for drug use. It is as close to a human recreation of the cages that guaranteed deadly addiction in rats as I can imagine. And when those prisoners get out, they will be unemployable because of their criminal record — guaranteeing they with be cut off even more. I watched this playing out in the human stories I met across the world.

There is an alternative. You can build a system that is designed to help drug addicts to reconnect with the world — and so leave behind their addictions.

This isn’t theoretical. It is happening. I have seen it. Nearly fifteen years ago, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe, with 1 percent of the population addicted to heroin. They had tried a drug war, and the problem just kept getting worse. So they decided to do something radically different. They resolved to decriminalize all drugs, and transfer all the money they used to spend on arresting and jailing drug addicts, and spend it instead on reconnecting them — to their own feelings, and to the wider society. The most crucial step is to get them secure housing, and subsidized jobs so they have a purpose in life, and something to get out of bed for. I watched as they are helped, in warm and welcoming clinics, to learn how to reconnect with their feelings, after years of trauma and stunning them into silence with drugs.

One example I learned about was a group of addicts who were given a loan to set up a removals firm. Suddenly, they were a group, all bonded to each other, and to the society, and responsible for each other’s care.

The results of all this are now in. An independent study by the British Journal of Criminology found that since total decriminalization, addiction has fallen, and injecting drug use is down by 50 percent. I’ll repeat that: injecting drug use is down by 50 percent. Decriminalization has been such a manifest success that very few people in Portugal want to go back to the old system. The main campaigner against the decriminalization back in 2000 was Joao Figueira, the country’s top drug cop. He offered all the dire warnings that we would expect from the Daily Mail or Fox News. But when we sat together in Lisbon, he told me that everything he predicted had not come to pass — and he now hopes the whole world will follow Portugal’s example.

This isn’t only relevant to the addicts I love. It is relevant to all of us, because it forces us to think differently about ourselves. Human beings are bonding animals. We need to connect and love. The wisest sentence of the twentieth century was E.M. Forster’s — “only connect.” But we have created an environment and a culture that cut us off from connection, or offer only the parody of it offered by the Internet. The rise of addiction is a symptom of a deeper sickness in the way we live — constantly directing our gaze towards the next shiny object we should buy, rather than the human beings all around us.

The writer George Monbiot has called this “the age of loneliness.” We have created human societies where it is easier for people to become cut off from all human connections than ever before. Bruce Alexander — the creator of Rat Park — told me that for too long, we have talked exclusively about individual recovery from addiction. We need now to talk about social recovery — how we all recover, together, from the sickness of isolation that is sinking on us like a thick fog.

But this new evidence isn’t just a challenge to us politically. It doesn’t just force us to change our minds. It forces us to change our hearts.

Loving an addict is really hard. When I looked at the addicts I love, it was always tempting to follow the tough love advice doled out by reality shows like Intervention — tell the addict to shape up, or cut them off. Their message is that an addict who won’t stop should be shunned. It’s the logic of the drug war, imported into our private lives. But in fact, I learned, that will only deepen their addiction — and you may lose them altogether. I came home determined to tie the addicts in my life closer to me than ever — to let them know I love them unconditionally, whether they stop, or whether they can’t.

When I returned from my long journey, I looked at my ex-boyfriend, in withdrawal, trembling on my spare bed, and I thought about him differently. For a century now, we have been singing war songs about addicts. It occurred to me as I wiped his brow, we should have been singing love songs to them all along.

The full story of Johann Hari’s journey — told through the stories of the people he met — can be read in Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, published by Bloomsbury. The book has been praised by everyone from Elton John to Glenn Greenwald to Naomi Klein. You can buy it at all good bookstores and read more at http://www.chasingthescream.com.

Johann Hari will be talking about his book at 7pm at Politics and Prose in Washington DC on the 29th of January, at lunchtime at the 92nd Street Y in New York City on the 30th January, and in the evening at Red Emma’s in Baltimore on the 4th February.

The full references and sources for all the information cited in this article can be found in the book’s extensive end-notes.

If you would like more updates on the book and this issue, you can like the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/chasingthescream

What’s the highlights?

iolo – Member
What’s the highlights?

Societal exclusion/separation/loneliness.

Johann Hari? I’m quite surprised that lying hack is allowed anywhere near a keyboard, let alone finding an outlet that will actually publish him.

Johann Hari will be talking about his book at 7pm at Politics and Prose in Washington DC on the 29th of January, at lunchtime at the 92nd Street Y in New York City on the 30th January, and in the evening at Red Emma’s in Baltimore on the 4th February.

I’m afraid I’m busy those days in the past on another continent.

On a more serious note, it’s an iffy practice to cut and paste an entire article from a website, rather than a “fair use” excerpt and a link.

It was all going so well* until….

Johann Hari

*Obvs was just skimming it – TLDR and all that.

Plagiarist scumbag does not deserve your attention.

Societal exclusion/separation/loneliness.

Not exactly rocket science is it? Having a shit life and wanting to escape it is the cause in the vast majority of cases. Of course rather than facing up to the problems in society and attempting to solve them, the powers-that-be would rather talk about drug ‘pushers’ and blame the victims for not having the right moral fibre.

Plagiarist scumbag

Really? I thought making up “quotes” and attributing them to his interview subjects was more his thing, which when you think about it would actually make his journalism even more his own work!

dazh – Member
Not exactly rocket science is it?

It isn’t no. But alot of people do seems to be particularly hard of thinking on the subject.

btw I’ve no idea who it is that wrote the article, it’s the content that I thought was a decent enough, and blatantly obvious point.

johnners – Member
On a more serious note, it’s an iffy practice to cut and paste an entire article from a website, rather than a “fair use” excerpt and a link.

Only if you care about a particular websites hit rate and their advertising revenues. Clearly, I don’t! 😆

I thought making up “quotes” and attributing them to his interview subjects was more his thing

That’s not what he did. He plagiarised quotes from other interviews that his subjects had given previously, and then claimed that they’d said them in HIS interview.

Skim read. Seems hugely unscientific. High on rhetoric and emotion, low on details.

There are different kinds of addiction caused by different things. Surely this is both obvious and well known?

So summary is it’s a just an unsubstantiated hypothesis?

Only if you care about a particular websites hit rate and their advertising revenues. Clearly, I don’t!

the STW bods might disagree since they’re the ones publishing it…

nemesis – Member
Only if you care about a particular websites hit rate and their advertising revenues. Clearly, I don’t!
the STW bods might disagree since they’re the ones publishing it…

They are welcome to delete.

molgrips – Member
Skim read. Seems hugely unscientific. High on rhetoric and emotion, low on details.

There are different kinds of addiction caused by different things. Surely this is both obvious and well known?Well that seems to be how the current war on drugs is justified from one side. So fire with fire?

That’s not what he did. He plagiarised quotes from other interviews that his subjects had given previously, and then claimed that they’d said them in HIS interview.

Ah, I see. I must have misread it at the time, or muddled it up in my head since. Which is possibly what Johann tried to claim at the time.

No. Just results in more things burning. Or in debating terms, it just escalates into hysteria and entrenched positions on both sides.

I’m a straight edge, but I’m in favour of legalisation of MOST drugs. I agree with the article in so far as needing to tackle the emotional causes of drug abuse instead of criminalising victims.

However – afaik most of the war on drugs is targeted at supply, isn’t it? Which seems reasonable given what the supply chain are reported to get up to.

However – the causes of addiction are definitely in the scientific realm. The reasons for *becoming* addicted are somewhat different and more in the realm of this article.

molgrips – Member
However – afaik most of the war on drugs is targeted at supply, isn’t it? Which seems reasonable given what the supply chain are reported to get up to.

I don’t really think that’s true tbh.

Loads of resourses still go to dealing with possession.

My dog is dosed up on tramadol and gabapentin. Is he at risk of becoming an addict?

some numbers E & W 2011/12

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/116435/hosb0812.pdf
Offence – Number of offences
Trafficking in controlled drugs – 32,336
Other drug offences – 1,142
Possession of controlled drugs (excluding cannabis) – 38,711
Possession of controlled drugs (cannabis) – 160,733

molgrips – Member
However – the causes of addiction are definitely in the scientific realm. The reasons for *becoming* addicted are somewhat different and more in the realm of this article.

That’s entirely the point of the article though, that is you want to tackle addiction you need to look at prevention rather than cure(although it is alluding that prevention and cure are the same thing in the article).

molgrips – Member
No. Just results in more things burning. Or in debating terms, it just escalates into hysteria and entrenched positions on both sides.

But the argument isn’t getting framed in any other respect, the logical arguments are all out there, and are just ignored. So it’s fairly obviously that the argument is going to have to be won on an emotional level imo, as that’s where the battle lines have been drawn, the nay sayers aren’t particularly swayed by logic. Something which they demonstrate time and time again..

How time and effort spend on those two though? Easy to search a stoner and book them for posession – harder to bust a supply ring.

I don’t know for sure what the police priorities are of course – any coppers in?

So it’s fairly obviously that the argument is going to have to be won on an emotional level imo.

You can’t win arguments like that – it just provokes equal emotion from the other side and you end up with a noisy stalemate that drowns out any kind of reason.

molgrips – Member
You can’t win arguments like that – it just provokes equal emotion from the other side and you end up with a noisy stalemate that drowns out any kind of reason.

How else can you go about it when logic is consistently ignored?

You can’t talk to people who won’t listen. That’s a long standing problem. I have no idea how to fix that.

All you can do is keep finding new ways to argue constructively, and promote debate. If your argument is sound you’ll win those debates eventually. Resorting to emotive empty rhetoric is guaranteed to lose the debate because it can always be dismissed as such.

All you can do is keep finding new ways to argue constructively, and promote debate. If your argument is sound you’ll win those debates eventually.

Same sex marriage being a case in point…..

Seems hugely unscientific. High on rhetoric and emotion, low on details

Pretend it is a religion and defend it to your last dying breath 😛
You really do like to argue debate for the sake of it dont you

Societal exclusion/separation/loneliness.

Thats pretty revolutionary, ground-breaking thinking. He must have stayed up all night. Or at least until half twelve

binners – Member
Societal exclusion/separation/loneliness.
Thats pretty revolutionary, ground-breaking thinking. He must have stayed up all night. Or at least until half twelve

There is clearly a necessity to state the **** obvious.

Yeah but he states in the title that the reasons ‘… are not what you think’

Well its exactly what i thought the reasons where. And anyone else with anything between their ears who’s ever had any direct experience of the subject (as opposed to what they read in the Daily Mail). And theres no point telling those people, because they’re minds are completely closed, and they won’t accept the glaringly obvious, no matter what, as it contradicts their incredibly nonsensical, evidence-spurning world view

You really do like to argue debate for the sake of it dont you

No I bloody well don’t. What I do is point out flawed thinking and try to explain the flaws as I see them. I also call out bullshit.

binners – Member
Yeah but he states in the title that the reasons ‘… are not what you think’

Well its exactly what i thought the reasons where. And anyone else with anything between their ears who’s ever had any direct experience of the subject (as opposed to what they read in the Daily Mail). And theres no point telling those people, because they’re minds are completely closed, and they won’t accept the glaringly obvious, no matter what, as it contradicts their incredibly nonsensical, evidence-spurning world viewi suspect you aren’t the intended audience.

No I bloody well don’t. What I do is point out flawed thinking and try to explain the flaws as I see them. I also call out bullshit.
[/quote]

Hmm, JY has lots of experience in this area, I think he’s probably right 😉

All you can do is keep finding new ways to argue constructively, and promote debate. If your argument is sound you’ll win those debates eventually.

Unless the person your debating with has a life of course 😛

Unless the person you’re debating with has a life of course

😆